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Or, rather, they (the roughly
one billion Catholics of this planet) now have
a new Pope, former German cardinal Joseph Ratzinger,
now known as Benedict XVI. As a former Catholic
(sort of) and an Italian who grew up not far from
the Vatican, I followed the American media frenzy
over the death of John Paul II with much interest,
although the whole coverage by CNN and company
struck me as rather odd. It is true that Catholics
still make up a large fraction of Americans (and
they vote based on some  but apparently
not others  of their beliefs, as John Kerry
discovered when it turned out that abortion is
a moral issue, but war somehow isn't). Still,
only 20% of American Catholics actually claim
to closely follow the dictates of any Pope, and
the US media usually pays little or no attention
to what the self-described infallible sage from
Rome says or does. No, the media frenzy was really
just another example of celebrity worship, no
different from the coverage of Michael Jackson's
trial or the ever-fascinating saga of who Brad
Pitt really goes to bed with.

That said, what ought we
to think about the just departed Pope, Carol
Wojtyla? As a scientist, I can't really complain
that much about him. He managed to officially
pardon Galileo (almost four centuries later,
but hey!), though he refused to apologize
for burning Giordano Bruno at the stakes.
John Paul II also wrote a letter to the Pontificial
Academy of Sciences in 1997 advising Vatican
scientists (and Catholics at large) that the
Church doesnt have a problem with the
scientific theory of evolution (that didn't
help me much when I was living in Tennessee,
since most of the local creationists would
simply retort that the Pope was wrong and
sure to go to Hell, which I'm confident would
have come as shocking news to the man from
Poland!).

On the other hand, Wojtyla was
certainly a very conservative Pope, even by the
standards of the Catholic Church as they had evolved
since the Second Vatican Council. John Paul II
refused to consider a larger role of women in
the Church, actively campaigned against the use
of contraceptives worldwide (Church officials
on the ground in Africa have been accused of lying
about the effectiveness of condoms to prevent
AIDS, just to promote their senseless abstinence
only policy), not to mention of course his
opposition to gay rights and abortion. While one
can surely expect the 2000-year old institution
based in Rome to fighting a rear-guard war against
human progress, it seems to me that a man indirectly
responsible for the death and suffering of millions
around the globe should hardly be considered for
a fast-track to sainthood! Indeed, there have
been many dissenting Catholic voices, even within
the Roman Curia, against the strictness of Wojtyla's
views.

Which brings us to Benedict XVI.
Although Ratzinger chose his name with the intent
of being conciliatory (Benedict the XV inherited
a highly divided Church at the beginning of the
20th century, with progressives once again pitted
against conservatives, and did his best to bring
about a reconciliation), he isn't exactly known
as a moderate within the Vatican. On the contrary,
Ratzinger served under John Paul II as head of
the Congregation for the Doctrine of the
Faith, a position that allowed him to punish
a score of liberals within the Church.
According to the New York Times, one of Ratzinger's
comments on his role as defender of Catholic orthodoxy
was that The Pope told me that it is my
biggest religious obligation not to have my opinions.
How sad. And yet, how remarkably apt to capture
not just Ratzinger's position, but the whole idea
of the Catholic Church: not only there is one
invariable truth, but nobody else can access it
other than the highest ranks of the Church itself.
It is precisely this sort of attitude, of course,
that started the Protestant Reform and brought
about a major schism among Christians, a schism
that Benedict XVI is highly unlikely to help heal.

There are good reasons to think that Ratzinger
has been chosen to succeed John Paul II because
the august cardinals debating inside the Sistine
Chapel had no idea of where the Church should
go, and just wanted to buy some time (they
are supposed to be inspired directly by God,
but it seems that even the Almighty needed
five rounds of voting to make up His mind).
On the one hand, North Americans, and especially
Europeans, have been abandoning the Church
precisely on the ground of the kind of strict
orthodoxy enforced by John Paul II and, likely,
by Benedict XVI. Most Catholics in Western
countries seem to feel an increasing cognitive
dissonance between the realities of a complex
multi-cultural society and a set of teachings
that has hardened over two millennia. Then
again, the Church has been growing especially
in South America and Africa, where evangelical
Christians and ultra-orthodox Catholics have
been making the fastest gains in terms of
converts. Thorned between choosing a liberal
Pope to recoup some of the losses in Europe
and the US, and an even more conservative
one to help the expansion in the new territories, the college of cardinals went for the safest
choice: an old Pope (Ratzinger is 78), who
will maintain the same course established
by John Paul II for a few more years. After
that, God will provide. Or will She?

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